With the technology of brands such as Apple and Samsung, smartphones are hot and in demand with their latest designs selling faster than ever. More searches are being carried out on mobile phones (64%) now compared to computers (35%). And that’s partly due to the sheer ease in portability and the improving accessibility of our mobile phones.

Right now, one of the most important aspects for optimising your website is making sure that it’s mobile-friendly. It’s not only essential for your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but also in providing a better user experience for users.

Read more: How Can I Optimise My Website’s Mobile Experience For Local SEO?

Why You Need To Optimise for Mobile

Optimising websites for mobile users can significantly improve its rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and this is key since search drives more traffic to local websites.

When we talk about optimising your site for mobile users, we’re talking about the process of making a website easier to use on a mobile device. The loading speeds are super-fast for mobile connections, the content is easy to view on smaller screens, and navigating the site is a dream. This isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for your customers, too. After all, who would want to stay on a slow-loading page that is just pages upon pages of written content?

If you need a bit of motivation to get the ball rolling… Google actually penalises websites these days if they are not mobile-friendly.

Optimise for Local Searches

It’s no secret that organic traffic from search engines leads to more conversions. But without that optimisation there, the amount of organic traffic you get will be lower because you’re further down the rankings.

Optimising for local SEO gives you a good chance among local searches. So when users search for ‘xxx near me’, you’re there. That simple. To do this you need to optimise for local keywords and have location-specific pages on your website that also have local backlinks.

What’s So Important About Optimising Mobile for Local SEO?

Not optimising your site for mobile is a mistake, especially with that 60% statistic about mobile users. You miss potential traffic which means you miss out on what could be a rather significant amount of business for you.

Page Loading Speed

Page loading speed was briefly mentioned but let’s explore that more, now. A slow loading time for your website pages, and especially on a mobile connection, can really impact your SEO efforts. And that includes your local SEO efforts, too.

Search engine algorithms are made up of dozens of ranking factors and one of the larger ones is user experience. Many things can contribute to a user’s experience on your website – think navigation, content, media, and, you guessed it, page loading speed. So when your website is taking just a bit too long to load, users are more likely to have a negative user experience.

They get frustrated, lose patience (especially when they’re in a hurry or don’t have very long!) and then end up leaving the site. This results in your site having lower engagement metrics and a higher bounce rate. Not that great.

Not sure how to minimise your page loading speeds? Compress your media files. Minimise how many codes you have on pages, use hosting services that are known to be fast. You can even use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights for website performance analysis.

Impact on Local SEO

Optimised your site to be mobile-friendly? Your website thanks you. Because now you’ve also improved your local SEO efforts. When you optimise for mobile, you provide valuable metrics that can be used to analyse the performance of your website. You don’t have to do it all yourself, you can use resources to help.

Cough, Google Analytics, cough.

Measuring the performance of your website is essential because you can track things such as the number of mobile visitors to your site, how many of them came from a local search, and their engagement.

You can learn more about your mobile audiences which helps you going forward into the future when you develop and improve your existing mobile optimisation strategy. For instance, your future strategy may include targeting another geographic location because you had many mobile users from that region.

Any SEO Is Helpful for Your Site

It’s important to have some sort of SEO strategy in place for your site because some SEO is better than none. Trust us. We’ve seen it all – we’ve been at it for over 10 years.

SEO directly affects your ranking on the SERPs. Alright, with organic SEO it’s not instant. It doesn’t work overnight. But you can be sure that in 6 months’ time, you’ll be reaping the benefits. Don’t wait to start optimising your website – do it today.

And if you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you out with that… Give us a call! 😉

We are an experienced, multi-award winning marketing agency creating strategies that work for you. Even if all you want is guidance.

Organic SEO, local SEO, paid SEO – we’ll tailor to you.

All you have to do is send a message via info@growtraffic.co.uk or ring the telephone: 0161 706 0012.